That Reply all mistake only happened once to me before I learned my lesson. Replied to a co-worker about what we should get the boss for Christmas. "How about a clue?" Sent to the whole school.Soooo happy that Groupwise had a 'delete if unread' sent email function.

i started working with computers at the department of commerce in the early/mid 90's. we had banyan. we used banyan mail...not the gui 'beyond mail'. use the arrows, keystrokes, the whole bit.

well...if you walked away from your computer without locking it, we would draft an email to Secretary Ron Brown and leave it up on your screen, unsent. Mail had a weirds set of keystrokes to get the mail off the screen without just sending.

well, greg left to go talk to the ladies one afternoon and we drafted a great one to the secretary...

Ron-

if i may call you ron. you are one sexy man. i want to do nasty things to you in your office....you get the picture....

love greg ext 3000

well, greg gets back and hits the wrong thing and blam...it goes. you could feel the pressure change from all the puckering that just happened. we rush down to the secretary's office and find that he isn't there. we steal his computer because 'it's broken' (what we told his office manager) and leave. he had a mac...with a humongous monitor. nice fish tank at the time too.

we didn't know much about how networks worked but we wanted to stop him from logging in. i've since learned that most powerful people don't login. they ahve people do it for them. well, we changed his password, logged in as him and deleted the email.

our government boss (i was a contractor) came in and asked what all the fuss was about. after a few minutes we realized that he knew we were up to something. he finally just asked...who didn't hit the right keys and who did it go to. he laughed...told us to never do it again (which we broke the next day but only amongst ourselves).

we replaced the mac, gave the office manager the new password and went on our way.

a few months later, greg was hitting on one of the girls in the secretarys office and the office manager told the girl to not bother since greg was gay and had a thing for ron brown. evidently...she read the email.

Years ago, a freelancer sent in an article for a magazine I worked for. She requested I send it back to her after editing so she could have final approval. I forwarded it to my manager with a note along the lines of "She's just going to fiddle-fart around with it if I send it back to her. We're up against our deadline and I don't have the time or inclination for her to twaddle around with it for the next week and a half. When I'm done, it runs. Screw her." Sadly, it was "Reply" rather than "Forward" I had hit.

/she yanked the piece//got an ear-full from her///got one from the boss too////ended up writing a filler piece myself overnight//no fiddle-farting or twaddling

I was working in an office once and a message (granted, it was an instant message, but same situation) came through to everyone:

"I swear, Jeff is such a prick!"

...then about a minute later:

"Hi, I think I accidentally sent something to everyone instead of just the intended recipient. I was talking about another guy named Jeff who nobody here knows. I wasn't talking about the Jeff who works right beside me."

We all larfed 'coz she was clearly talking about Jeff from our office. He was a prick and we all knew it.